Business Person of the Year 2010
Pamela J. Year verbally chisels out one point crystal clear: Mankato-based MRCI WorkSource is a $46 million private nonprofit business. It has never been nor will ever be a government agency. MRCI WorkSource’s 335 paid staff members create innovative employment programs for more than four thousand people with disabilities.
Read MoreBusiness Person of the Year 2010 – Runner-Up
Jerry Dulas is much more comfortable moving dirt from the seat of an excavator cab than sitting at an office table answering a magazine writer’s questions. That’s why his daughter, Tanya Pierce, offered to buffer the experience by joining in the interview. It was Tanya who nominated her father for Connect Business Magazine Business Person of the Year 2010, somewhat to his dismay.
Read MoreBusiness Person of the Year 2010 – Runner-Up
In roundabout fashion, sour has become deliciously sweet for Bryan Sweet. To begin, when he was only age four, his father and mother’s marriage soured down in Blue Earth. Then Dad decided to live much closer to Mankato and would not utter another word to Bryan the rest of his life. It was painful.
Read MoreBusiness Person of the Year 2009
John Finke, our Business Person of the Year 2009 and president of Mankato-based, $155 million HickoryTech Corporation, also accents his conversations with a choice word. It’s “certainly,” an adverb, which means definitely, positively, undoubtedly or unquestionably.
Read MoreI abhor snow. I despise ice. The razor sharp edge of a howling north wind, the hours of darkness, the scraping, scratching, sniffling and shoveling, the huffing, puffing, panting and freezing.
Read MoreRemember the tintype photos of buttoned-down bankers wearing vested suits, their glasses perched on their noses? It’s the stereotype from 125 years ago, about the time Sam Gault’s great-grandfather, Zuriel Gault, went to work at Nicollet County Bank.
Read MoreIn 1971, 22-year-old Dale Brenke had wrapped up his accounting training at Mankato Commercial College and was wiping windshields and pumping petrol part-time for Bernie’s One Stop service station on Front Street across from Hubbard Milling. The $1.10 an hour pay helped—somewhat. He was actively searching for a better job, but his search had been impeded by a pesky U.S. recession affecting Mankato.
Read MoreWayne Kahler, founder of Kahler Automation in Fairmont, credits his father with his success. His father, Roy, taught him to “take care of the customer and everything else will be taken care of.”
“I claim my father’s statement,” Kahler says. “If I don’t think a customer is getting what they want, I’m asking questions. A business consultant said I’ve given out too many resources in satisfying customers and have not made as much profit as I could have made. We didn’t retain his services—and we’ve grown and grown.” That growth resulted in a February 2007 move to a 21,000-square foot building in Fairmont’s industrial park.
Read MoreFresh from verdant Hawaii, blue crab Baltimore, oil-rich Oklahoma City, and with the possibility of visiting other potential construction projects in Denmark, 34-year-old Clint Brown of Industrial Construction Services (ICS) of St. James barely has time to change his socks before leaving home for yet another construction job elsewhere on the planet. He has become quite the frequent flyer the last thirteen years. Though able to spend only 100 days a year at home and having to work literally every Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, July Fourth, Labor Day and Memorial Day ad infinitum, Brown nonetheless enjoys his frenetic life and lifestyle.
In just the last few years, the pace has quickened considerably, in great measure because of anthrax and avian flu fears.
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